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Not trying to be overly flippant... who cares?
The paper opens with "to feed a growing population" without asking is that what we need? want? where we are actually heading to?
Is feeding the world a real problem? I've yet to see compelling evidence that it really is except as a secondary effect of logistics, energy supply, and war.
edit: I understand the environmental impacts. I think we should solve our energy problems first.
> Is feeding the world a real problem?
Yes, but it is not a production capacity problem. The constraints on food are mostly in the logistics chain, often having to do with corruption or distribution targets (food goes where the money is), or regulation (did you know that cherry growers in the Upper Midwest are required --_by Federal law_-- to destroy unsold crops?).
A huge amount of food goes to waste simply because of regulation or subsidies, at least within the United States.
It's the leading cause of deforestation which is a major factor in climate change. It also is a major contributor to climate change for other reasons. Since you mentioned energy, it's also much less energy efficient.
Isn't this something to care about?
I recommend you visiting the Brazilian region of Pantanal, if possible travel through Mato Grosso do Sul -> Mato Grosso -> southern Pará where it transitions into the Amazon.
You will see vast areas of cattle ranching, soybeans plantation used for cattle feed, and other crops that can be used as cattle feed. All that area used to be the Pantanal and Amazon, now transformed to grow beef.
If we would reduce the calories wasted on beef, this area could still have a lot more native vegetation. Of course, it's purely wishful thinking because this ship has sailed, beef consumption will take a long time to stop growing, these farms will fight for their lives to keep producing, and we've lost a huge area of incredible nature to eat some steaks and burgers.
Solve our energy problems first? How would decreasing cattle stop work on improving our energy system? I think a lot points to that we need to do both (and yesterday). It’s not like agriculture is a small part of our greenhouse gas emissions (25-35% globally).
Exactly. The current world population is 8.3 billion and is expected to peak at 10.3 billion in 2080 and then begin declining. Now, there are a number of other reasons we might have food shortages, but population per se I don't think is a significant factor.
>I understand the environmental impacts. I think we should solve our energy problems first.
is there a rational argument in here or is this just a cheap psychological reflex to keep eating beef? Because it's not clear to me how solving our energy problems and the consumption of beef even intersect so that we couldn't do both at the same time.
You might as well have said "man I really should stop drinking and smoking, but we gotta solve the energy problems first"
Agreed. The market should decide if beef consumption is viable. Ultimately energy is the basis all food production. Cheap and plentiful energy solves the food production and distribution problem, then its just matter of preferences.
We have 8 billion people. We have enough people to solve both the energy problem and the food efficiency problem.
That said, it's very, very funny that you responded to an article about energy inefficiency (calorie -> calorie) and said we should solve our energy problems. Beef is an energy problem! We're putting 30x the energy into the product against the energy we get out! Thats wasted energy!
> edit: I understand the environmental impacts. I think we should solve our energy problems first.
There's no "first." There's not a queue of problems that the people of the world work on one by one. It's not a matter of limited labor/money either, we're talking about policies to change allocation. If anything is limited here it's political will, but that doesn't really work like money or physical limitations, it's more abstract and nonlinear. It's quite possible that a platform containing more changes earns more will than one with fewer, so budgeting is the wrong impulse.
> If excess beef consumption were reduced to healthy quantities, as defined by the EAT-Lancet healthy reference diet, and substituted with chicken in forty-eight higher-income countries, the lost calories avoided would be enough to meet the caloric needs of 850 million people.
It's really impressive how efficient chickens are compared to beef. Obviously thinks like legumes are way more efficient, but we've really bred chickens to be meat machines in a way we haven't with cows.
> To feed a growing population, it is essential that the global agri-food system be managed to efficiently convert crop production into calories for human consumption.
It's really not. Efficiency is the enemy of redundancy. Countries want food security, so they must therefore produce excess calories.
Cows eat grass. Humans use more calories digesting grass than they gain from eating grass, so cows are infinitely more efficient than humans at gaining calories from grass.
And there are places in the world where growing human food would destroy the land. Semi-deserts like Texas and Montana. Grazing cattle there is a good idea. Bison would be even better because the native prairie there is adapted to bison, but cattle are a close substitute.
But we eat a lot more cattle than Texas & Montana can support.
There are people who for various ideological reasons hate beef.
If the market demands more chicken over beef, producers are perfectly capable of making a switch.
Cows are able to make delicious beef from grass and thistles; that they are often fed other things is not a proof that eating cows is bad.
"lost calories" as if having people consume animal feed to reduce total caloric loss is a good idea.
I think we need more ruminant animals raised on grass as a means of regenerative farming... I think beef largely gets a bad rap for a lot of reasons that largely don't hold to grass fed cattle farming.
Surprised how many people in the replies actually think their beef is grass fed.
Actual title: Only half of the calories produced on croplands are available as food for human consumption
Stop filtering your nutrition through animals. It’s inefficient.
One of the weakest and least persuasive arguments, like animal cruelty, against animal ag. Data will also never convince anyone that they're doing something dangerous or selfish especially when their salary or lifestyle can be justified and rationalized through denial and cognitive dissonance.
The stronger arguments are:
- Local air, water, and soil pollution.
- Climate change 16±2% contribution.
- Antibiotic resistant bacteria evolution because the antibiotics over used in livestock are typically used in humans through the mostly different veterinary supply chain but they're the same fundamental molecules.
- Pandemic virus evolution due to both wildlife and (human, for now) workers getting very, very close to animals and animal waste crowded together creating a Petri dish. It's already happened several times throughout history.
Exchanging e.g. grains for beef is not 'lost' anything, even if theoretically the former gives more calories. Nutritionally beef is just more valuable. Calories isn't the only thing we need apparently.
And is not even taking water consumption into account.
Or the annoying cowbells :)
> we need the calories to feed a growing population
> population doubles
> we need the calories to feed a growing population
As a sidenote for this audience - this is multiple magnitudes higher global warming impact than AI. If anything this and daily commutes optimization are the key ways software engineers can directly impact carbon, way more than AI as a tool.
trophism is very much like manufacture.
you always have to pay to continue the process, and sometimes to put it on hold.
Transfer of Energy between Trophic Levels:
https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_and_Gene...
Ecological efficiency:
Hmm, I wonder if beef is more expensive than chicken to reflect the inefficiency in its production? Oh it is. So it must then be that people just prefer the flavor and taste of it as compared to cheaper meats then.
Then can human process grass?
The really good thing about this is that if we somehow do manage to "ruin earth" and lose a significant portion of agricultural production, we will just have less tasty food rather than starving to death.
Food waste is another kind of "slack" in the food supply chain that would help. Imagine how the world would look if food supply was as optimized as e.g. microchips and then we got any kind of disruption... except now you starve rather than not being able to upgrade your car.
Treating protein as calories is a category error.
Fat and carbs are energy, properly treated as calories. Protein is not (in a non-starving person) used for energy, and it should be measured in grams not calories. The input calories weren't lost, they were converted to protein for use building body structure instead of energetic use.
If the authors wanted to make an honest argument here, they would show the relative conversion of feed calories to animal protein across different livestock.
Beef gets a lot of bad rep in environment terms because developed countries grain fed it in intensive settings. But not all cattle in the world is raised like that.
Small anecdote
Since about 2019 I have been anemic. My iron levels were just a hair above being low enough to require an immediate infusion, and my doctor kept pushing me to eat more iron. She would often ask if I was a vegetarian or vegan, presumably she was assuming I was bad at it. I would always tell her the same thing. "I don't eat much beef but I do eat it"
Last summer I was diagnosed with celiac. Suddenly it all makes sense. I'm low on iron because my gut cannot absorb it.
So I start eating gluten free, and I start eating way more red meat than I used to, because building your iron levels takes a lot more iron intake than maintaining it. Now, about 8-9 months later I'm finally starting to feel better and my blood tests are showing my iron slowly creeping out of the danger zone
My nutritionist tells me that recovering this quickly would have probably been just about impossible for a vegetarian or vegan, without having an iron infusion done.
Anyways. Beef is kind of an important thing in our diets, that's all. Now that I'm back to a more normal level I'll go back to eating less of it, but I am now very conscious how important red meat is in a rounded diet
Edit: I guess my point is that calories are only part of the picture when it comes to food and there are a lot of other concerns as well, which are arguably more important to being healthy. You get calories from basically anything food you eat (assuming it's not some kind of engineered zero calorie diet food) but other minerals and vitamins are harder to source.
isn't the obvious answer not to eat less beef but rather not produce beef super fast with grain feed. if the beef we ate came from grass lands + hay in the the winter it would cost more, but would dramatically reduce the crop consumption...
false comparison, as most calories cattle consume are from things people dont eat, even if there are simmilar variets of plants that both people and animals eat, they are not interchangable.
Animals also eat huge quantities of human food, that has been rejected through some technical consideration, just size, as many crops produce many fruits or vegetables that are iether too large or small to be processed, or are misshapen or damaged, cow dont care nom nom nom, gone by the ton, and the trucks are still comming.
The true unforgivable waste is by people over eating, wasting, throwing away, and destroying good foog for countless beurocratic reasons.
This is already covered in the Soylent Green protocol isn't it?
An alternate take: if calorie efficiency is so important we should focus on consumption more than production.
Conversion efficiency is slippery slope to vegetarianism.
Another factor that these studies seem to miss from the beef question is the fact there is more pasture land than viable agriculture land. Beef are often grazing on marginal land that would not be fit for much else. Clearcutting the amazon to meet beef demand is one thing but that isn't the case for I'd guess most places they have been farming beef for the past 100 years.
Ok but don't cattle often browse on land that is too marginal for farming? And don't they eat grass? I don't know if this argument holds up.
Are the calories used by biofuels and cattle even directly consumable by humans?
Also them: more adults globally eat too many calories
I recommend the book The Proof is in the Plants for a seemingly unbiased review of the literature.
Dude cites study after study pretty much all with the same conclusion: Eating animal products is bad for your health.
I don't eat grass.
Taylor swift is using her private jet to take out the trash to the curb, but hey, the "normal people" should eat less meat.
Don't care, I refuse to eat bugs and slop.
don't care, not gonna eat bugs.